Interview: Ian Mckee

Interview: Ian Mckee with ComingTechs

Newsdesk: Please tell us something about yourself .

Ian Mckee: Born in the UK, Did Engineering+ Economics at University. Joined Sun Microsystems as a tech person. Became their evangelist for AI. Moved into Sales, selling Trading Floors to the Banks in the City of London. Moved to a Data business, IRI, which the got bought by Oracle, we became their Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence division. Moved to Singapore to run a Systems Integration business. Started Vocanic in 2004 when I felt that a was a major disruption coming to the world of advertising and marketing. Grew it to over 100 staff with teams in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Philippines. Sold it to WPP a few years ago and did the integration with GroupM. Left about 1 year ago to do a new start-up – Vuulr (pronounced Viewler) – we are creating a new Broadcast Content Ecosystem with an Online Marketplace and Blockchain based SupplyChain for Film/TV & Sports Content.

Newsdesk: You founded and run the Vocanic. Tell us about your experience with it.

Ian Mckee: I would guess it was the same experience every entrepreneur’s faces – exhilarating, terrifying, satisfying depressing, rewarding – often all on the same day!

The truth is that I set out with a simple belief, that technology enablement (smartphones, social media, 3G etc) would come together and mean that the stories that customers shared between themselves would become the dominant media channel – and would replace the then dominant “30 Second Slot”. The big Ad Agencies (in 2004 & 2005) thought I was crazy and told their customers they could ignore Vocanic. I was happy that time proved them wrong and Social Media & Content Marketing became a key component of a marketing plan. I was happy to have been part of that disruption process.

Newsdesk: Please Tell us about Vuulr.

Ian Mckee:Vuulr is my new startup. It is a global platform transforming the Film and TV Content Ecosystem. We are building a supply chain for the global TV & Film industry, on the blockchain. Plus, an online marketplace to allow the global trading of content rights. $240 billion per year is spent by Broadcasters and OTTs on acquiring Film, TV, Sports, and e-Sports content, but around 40% of that value can be lost to the cost and friction of the transaction. Acquiring rights can take months of emails, phone calls, and trade show meetings. Even today, it’s a slow, manual process to find, negotiate and close. Vuulr changes that paradigm. Imagine if, instead of taking months to source and acquire the rights to a title, you could go from discovery to delivery in under 24 hours. Imagine if that same platform allowed new content ideas to get funded and for brands to take part in the content economy. This is Vuulr. Soon, we will be running an ICO launching Vuulr Tokens, the currency within the Vuulr ecosystem..

Newsdesk: Since you worked in different regions of Asia in the digital and social marketing domain, how you see the potentiality and challenges for Asia?

Ian Mckee: Every country (in Europe as well as Asia ) is different. Local culture plays a role, Smartphone penetration, internet penetration, GDP distribution, age/demographic distribution .. all of these play a factor. But onto of that is some basic truths that are born from that fact that despite some differences, people are & behave very similarly and are often motivated by the same things.

Newsdesk: How do you see the growth of blockchain technologies? (what is your comment/view about it?)

Ian Mckee: Blockchain will bring a whole new level of disruption – equal to (if not more than) the disruption that “The Internet” has brought. We are in the very early stages now, but the sheer amount of intellectual capital (ie the number of super bright people), the open source model, and the ability for bright people to raise money via ICO to bring these ideas to life means that ABSOLUTELY for sure, the next Amazon, Facebook, Google-scale business is out there, just starting today.

Newsdesk: What is the application of blockchain in digital marketing areas?

Ian Mckee: HUGE. And disruptive. One of the benefits of the blockchain is to “remove the unnecessary middleman”, businesses that have grown up by being the middleman between a content, content creator and the consumer of the content. The blockchain will threaten that whole class of business often referred to as “Publishers” as it provides distributed content distribution.

It will also hugely affect the digital advertising / programmatic ecosystem – with a lot of people being focused on addressing the issues such as view ability, brand safety and click fraud and general transparency.

Newsdesk: Please say some words for our readers in ComingTechs where we are introducing new upcoming technologies.

Ian Mckee: The blockchain is still in its very early phase of adoption, its moving very fast and has the ability to open up to question many of the fundamental assumptions that many businesses are built to be dependant on. Its a fabulous space to be involved with, as long as you love change and disruption.

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We love to discuss about the technologies that is coming and implementing in our society for a “better world”. We search for the scientific discoveries that we believe to be applied soon. At present we are focusing in coming techs of artificial intelligence, future healthcare, robotics, internet of things.